Hey, the head Lemur had a birthday Thursday and I just noticed. I’ll blame it on not using RSS.

Happy Birthday, Alan! You’re not as old as me but you’re catching up.

From Bush, Oprah and the San Diego Chicken to The Fool on the Hill… as if you didn’t have enough good stuff to read.

For the realistic, we have Rockstroh…

By way of a ceaseless bombardment of advertising imagery, we exist in a nonstop, holographic, corporate Nuremberg rally of the collective mind. We need not participate in old school, torch-lit processions of Brownshirts through the streets: This brand of all media penetration proto-fascism has been internalized. We, like maggots born into a pile of dung, find nothing malodorous about our place of birth.

For the moderate progressive, here’s the New Republic on last week’s news,

Dennis Hastert is a bumbling half-wit–something that became apparent to the world last week but had been common knowledge in Washington for almost a decade. It was roughly eight years ago, after all, that Tom DeLay installed Hastert as his front-man, knowing full well that Hastert was no more capable of being speaker than the average sheepdog, to which he bears a remarkable resemblance….

Here is Denny Hastert, master legislative strategist, peerless vote-counter, party-unifier extraordinaire. But, wouldn’t you know, absolutely none of these skills is evident in public. Invariably, one of two things strikes you about these stories. The first is that they’re so small-bore that they actually underscore the point that Hastert is a nonentity. Many of them even have a faintly patronizing tone, like a mother bragging that her 6-year-old poured his own bowl of Kix this morning.

When I hear someone say, “Oh yeah, I’m spiritual, but not — you know — religious,” I am reminded of Father Rageboy’s first commandment, to wit:

Vapid and narcissistic are they who repeat the mantra “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

Kneeling for communion at the temple of rage I heard the priest intone, “Take, eat this you whitebread muthahfuckah… it’s nobody’s body, we’re spiritual here but not religious, it’s just a metaphor… whitebread, get it? Do you get it!? Whitebread schmuck.”

I could see why they called it the temple of rage. The temple of rage, of course was but one stop on my metaphysical journey. I also spent a great deal of time at Starbucks seeking the clarity of an open wireless connection. And the Crate and Barrel outlet store down on 4th Street in Berkeley. Williams of Sonoma on Union Square. Pottery Barn at better malls across America. Nordstroms. The Nature Company in its original location just outside the tunnel on the Alameda. Smith and Hawken in Mill Valley… Ahhh, hippie capitalism at its best. Plant materials from Berkeley Hort. Sensual massage at Esalen down in Big Sur. A house in Marin, good dope, identical twins… little scorpios in their tandem stroller and identical maple cribs.

Spiritual was I, and bourgeois to the max. Dining out in the gourmet ghetto, riding BART with a New York Times done up in a commuter’s fold. The Larkspur ferry before that. Double vodka martinis and rubber bridge all the way home. My partner had some kind of three way going with Kaiser and Bechtel… Libyan bauxite, French refractories, and the best Bechtel built nuclear reactors available for offshore construction. We kicked ass. I was way spiritual on the commute home in those days.

I could balance the bindle and the straw and horn in copious quantities of Bolivia’s best in rough seas off Angel Island and never drop a crumb on the floor of the head. “Head.” That’s ferry boat nautical for toilet.

Was I spiritual but not religious?

When Locke writes these condemnatory tracts linking Emerson through Nietzsche to Hitler and Corporatist emergent fascism founded in post-war Allied fervid religious gratitude and shit, I pale. Is it me? All these people I hung out with were heavy into the Urantia Book and all that crap. Is it mean spirited and hypocritical of me to admit that I was only there then for the dope and the music.

All I can say right now is that I was NEVER that spiritual. And by the time I got religious I was well on my way to informed atheism, so screw the guilt. I can sit back free of guilt and enjoy his explication of the spiritual left and the spiritual right and the undercurrents that unite them, informed and aware and in concert with the idea that there is a lot of denial present whenever spiritual fundamentals overtake reason, common-sense, and altruism, whether that spirituality is founded in religion or the bourgeois mysticism that is vapid narcissism.

Something is happening here and I know what it is, I’m jonesing for more truth.

So there’s Doc, linking to Dean and I visit Dean and look in his blogroll and I see Annette Kramer, so I follow that link just because it doesn’t ring a bell, then I read a little, and then I feel rewarded.

(And that’s another reason I like blogrolls!)